Quotes About Reality

Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.

Reality is in the business of killing off fiction.

I stare at Isabel without blinking. I stare until I can see the pale roots of her natural hair and the expensive skin cream that changed her skin from milk to olive and the colored lenses that gave her yellow eyes and I wonder how she changed her breasts and ass and shortened her legs. I stare at her until her eyes are pointed and her teeth glitter like fangs and I have to close my eyes. If she said her name was Lucy and she faked her death I would believe her.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

it is hard to agree with reality if you cannot agree with yourself.

The remembering self's neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.

people who make judgments behave as if a true value exists, regardless of whether it does.

O fato central de nossa existência é que o tempo é o recurso finito supremo, mas o eu recordativo ignora essa realidade.

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

El mundo que imaginamos no es una réplica precisa de la realidad; nuestras expectativas sobre la frecuencia de los acontecimientos están distorsionadas por la prevalencia y la intensidad emocional de los mensajes que nos llegan.

What you learned about the Müller-Lyer illusion did not change the way you see the lines, but it changed your behavior. You now know that you cannot trust your impression of the length of lines that have fins appended to them, and you also know that in the standard Müller-Lyer display you cannot trust what you see. When asked about the length of the lines, you will report your informed belief, not the illusion that you continue to see.

Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality;

The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics

reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes.

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see.

the central fact of our existence is that time is the ultimate finite resource, but the remembering self ignores that reality

Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color.

Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence.

In everyday speech, we call people reasonable if it is possible to reason with them, if their beliefs are generally in tune with reality, and if their preferences are in line with their interests and their values. The